


a few dollars more

by Vintar



Category: Borderlands
Genre: F/F, Rough Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-12
Updated: 2015-11-12
Packaged: 2018-05-01 06:53:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5196404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vintar/pseuds/Vintar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nice kid, Vallory thinks. Some real potential. If she ever gets her hands on her again, she's going to skin her alive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a few dollars more

Technology has come a long way since Vallory was a child. There's guns she would have given someone else's arm and a leg for. Instant communication via Echo, without even having to hold it up and hope for a signal. Echo cameras so good that you can claim bounties without having to hack off heads and drag them in for identification.

You don't have to, but someone's gone to the trouble regardless. The local Echonet lights up with photos of her lieutenant's head, happily delivered to a nearby settlement. The miserable examples of what passes for law enforcement there have been posing with it, dressing it up in hats and glasses and taking photos. 

It is, apparently, a meme. Vallory makes August explain what a meme is. It doesn't improve the situation.

Those slimy yellow skaglicks would have never had the guts to do something like that, so she sends a few of her boys to find out who did. It doesn't take long. They drag in some bandit a few days later, dropping her on Vallory's front step. They're more bruised and battered than they had been when they'd set off; half of them are missing, and the rest of the survivors are bleeding in a variety of interesting ways.

Thugs these days. Vallory rolls her eyes and chews her cigar, then leans in to inspect her prize. 

Her recently departed be-memed lieutenant had been a tough son of a bitch, and she'd been expecting that his death and dismemberment came at the hands of some riled-up psycho, someone with more muscles than common sense.

Instead, his murderer isn't much to look at at all. Skinny, short. Rock brown skin and sand yellow eyes, lean and rangy. She sneers up at Vallory with a scavenger's contempt. Her lipstick matches the rising bruise on her cheekbone. To be honest, Vallory's seen worse looks.

"Look at what the cat dragged in," Vallory purrs, and blows smoke in her face. 

The girl is upside-down and hogtied, but she doesn't seem particularly fazed. "Correction: look at what the cat tried to drag in, and got shot repeatedly by." She jerks her chin towards one of Vallory's boys. "He cried."

"Shut up, I didn't cry," mumbles her target. 

"You're crying right now."

He takes his bloodied hand away from where he's been gripping his arm, hanging limp at his side. "She shot me in the funny bone!" he protests.

Their captive grins up at them. "Well, _I_ laughed."

Vallory is going to make August show her how to post things on the Echonet, and then she's going to put up a job advertisement for thugs who aren't complete morons, and then she's going to shoot the lot of them and hoist their sorry carcasses up for skagmeat.

But first things first. "Any last words, girl?"

"Yeah." The girl leans her head back against the concrete, and bares her teeth up at Vallory. "I think you have a job opening available."

***

There's no way Vallory's setting some complete stranger in her right-hand man's role, but there's always a to-do list when you're running the underworld on a desert planet from hell. Vallory sets Nisha on some long overdue head-hunting to earn her pardon: debts that never paid up, backstabbers and double-crossers, petty thieves. She expects the girl to head out then run for it, but a few days later Nisha lopes back into the camp with a Echo device full of photos of fresh corpses.

Standing in her house, Vallory thumbs through the photos. "No decapitations this time?"

"Eh." Nisha shrugs. She finishes the water Vallory's given her, sweat beading on her skin as she swallows. She's covered in dust and looking worse for wear, but there's a gruesome contentment in her eyes as she watches Vallory check her work. "It gets old after a while. All that hacking's hell on your hands." She mimes sawing through vertebrae, then flexes her fingers with a scowl. "Hand cramps suck."

Flip, flip, flip, murder, murder, murder. The whole list is present and accounted for. "I'm actually impressed," Vallory says. "That's not an easy thing."

Nisha grins. "Hey, when you've got a talent, you've got to run with it." She leans over the table, stretching. "So, I held my part of the bargain. If you're not going to execute me, then what now?"

Vallory opens her Echo comm, picking out a message. "Now? Now, I tell the guys at the safe to pay you what you've earned..."

"Much appreciated."

"And I let the armory know that you're clear to go replenish a reasonable amount of ammo..."

"Very courteous."

Vallory turns off her Echo and places a hand on the table, leaning in to meet Nisha. "And then I tell you that if I ever catch you anywhere around here again, I'm going to saw off your head myself."

Her scarred-up snarl has been known to make grown men quake in their boots. Nisha's grin grows even wider, her eyes flashing. "Aw, you flatterer."

"You have one day to get the hell out of town before I send my men after you."

"Stop it, you're making me swoon."

"You're too good to have working for anyone else, but killing you would be a waste. I could hire you myself, but I don't trust you as far as I could throw your skinny ass."

"Are you flirting with me? Because you're doing a great job."

Vallory narrows her eyes. The girl's wiring is all wrong, but she's used to working with head-cases and loonies. It's not the strangest thing in the world. "Do you _want_ me to be?"

Nisha tips her head this way and that, ambivalent. "Maybe I do," she says. "It's not like I'll need a whole day to out-run your losers."

Vallory's taste in women runs more towards arm-candy than arm-breakers, but she's not one to look a gift skag in the mouth. She makes Nisha leave her weapons on the counter, then leads back into her bedroom, and fucks her.

Whoever this strange little murderer is, she's got a taste for it. Nisha bucks underneath Vallory like she's born to it, then when she's fucked-out, she guides Vallory's hand to her throat. There's no _too hard_ , no _too much_. She takes everything Vallory gives to her, and when Vallory squeezes hard enough to go white-knuckled, she wheezes and jerks her way through another climax.

Vallory shoves Nisha down between her legs, and wraps her hands in that pretty black hair. Nisha does what she's told half the time, and bites her the other half, hissing and spitting. It's worth it.

After they're done, Nisha gets up on those long legs-- shaking more now than they'd even been when held at gunpoint-- and struts around Vallory's room. She picks up Vallory's discarded coat, closes it up, preens in from of the mirror. The bruises on her neck go well with the coat. Vallory lights a cigar and watches her. "I didn't take you for the vain type."

"Hey, a nice coat's a nice coat." Nisha twists and turns, eyeing herself in the mirror. "Sometimes it's nice to check out the finer things in life."

She tips a finger to her forelock. "Well," she says, "it's been fun. Call me if you ever backtrack on that whole hunting-me-down thing."

Before Vallory can get up, Nisha bolts, coat still in place. Vallory swears, jamming on her clothes, but she's too slow. By the time she slams open the door, gun in hand, Nisha's stolen her car, the keys frisked from the coat pockets.

She fires a shot at the car, but it's a pointless gesture. Nisha holds a hand out the window and waves, one finger raised.

Later, Vallory finds a new addition to the decapitated head meme: a photo of a single purple lipstick kiss, pressed to the center of a (now extremely unhygienic) forehead.

Nice kid, Vallory thinks. Some real potential. If she ever gets her hands on her again, she's going to skin her alive.


End file.
